The Ever So Unique Workshop On How To Become A Blacksmith

Forged by fire

As a boy, John Arnold loved visiting the last working blacksmith in his hometown of Berwick, N.S.

“He had an old bus bench and I used to curl up there and watch him,” he says. “That’s where it all started.”

As they say, the forge is strong with this one.

Fast-forward several decades and Arnold still warmed his heart with the embers of those memories. He read whatever he could find about blacksmithing and picked up a few tools — but how’s a modern person to learn such an ancient and mostly extinct trade?

Enter Sherbrooke Village on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore. The living historical village recreates authentic life in Nova Scotia from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Its $99 Five Hour Forge Blacksmith Workshop puts you in a unique blacksmith workshop under the tutelage of an authentic blacksmith.

The course is offered on Tuesdays from July to September and runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Classes are limited to four participants and they take people aged “nine to 90.”

“It was the five-hour forge at Sherbrooke that kick-started me and got me to move ahead with my dream of blacksmithing,” Arnold says. “It was everything and more.”

He finally got a chance not to just watch, but to really work as a blacksmith. The sparks were flying on his first day three years ago. “To me, it was the ultimate museum experience in Nova Scotia. You live it. You’re standing there by a 3,000-degree Fahrenheit forge and the anvil.”

Under the guidance of blacksmith Tony Huntley, he made a wall hook and a wood-stove poker. The poker hangs on the wall hook at his home. “The program is whatever you want it to be,” Arnold says. “Tony is a born teacher. He’s such a humble man, and very calming around the forge, and yet he makes the program fun and exciting.”

He’s been twice, and plans a third experience. At home, he’s hooked up a propane forge and is on his way to building a replica blacksmith shop.

He learns from Huntley how to do it, and where to get tools and coal and the other things you need.

“It’s very relaxing for me just to be there at the forge. Even the building has a smell to it — the smell of coal,” Arnold says. “When I start blacksmithing something, I never know where I’m going to end up with it.”

Huntley says sometimes people come to his course on a whim, while others are like Arnold and out to fill a lifelong dream. He’s taught hundreds of people, and they’ve all been able to make a piece or two to take home.

“The appeal for me is to take something that’s just a piece of steel and turn it into something that people love and have in their home and use on a daily basis,” he says. “Any little piece of metal can be something useful — if you have the skill set to do it.”

Huntley came to blacksmithing young. Much like Arnold, he hung out with the village blacksmith as a boy — only in his case, the village was Sherbrooke. He landed a job at the living museum nearly 20 years ago and trained as a blacksmith so that he could eventually take over the job. He says a day inside the forge today is unchanged from how it was in 1844. “They’re stepping back into time,” he says.